Chapter 6: Married
My first home as a married teenager was three rooms of a house adjacent to Texas Tech campus. Greg and I had our own kitchen but shared a bath with our landlady. Daddy lent us an old white Nash that looked like Moby Dick, the car Mike and I had taken to the drive-in only six months earlier. There was a tell-tale stain on the wool upholstery of the back seat. I hoped I wouldn’t have to see Mike Featherston.
Greg searched fruitlessly for a job. One night we went to the Red Raider Drive-in and the smell of popcorn made me puke. Suddenly everything made me puke. A television was beyond our means but we owned a radio and on February 25, 1964, we lay on the bed and listened to the broadcast as an unknown Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston for the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship.
Greg got a job, commission only, going door to door hawking Electrolux vacuum cleaners. After his training session, he came home and demonstrated the power of the motor in our own living room by sucking up three large steel balls. The carpet sweeper attachment has a separate motor, he enthused. Greg would’ve been his own first customer had we been able to afford an Electrolux, had we owned a carpet. Unfortunately, after two weeks, he still hadn’t sold a unit and they asked him to return his demo. He took a job unloading freight in a warehouse alongside Lubbock’s poorest laborers.
Tall, handsome, outgoing, and personable, Greg made friends everywhere he went. One day he brought Mike Featherston home for lunch. I could’ve killed him. We were down to our last can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti. Mary Limbo had bought three cans for a dollar and shared them with me. I was humiliated for Mike to see me pregnant, a dropout. He must have counted himself lucky not to be in Greg’s shoes. But Mike behaved as decently as he always had. In fact, he stayed in touch with my family and even came with them to New Mexico to see the new baby later that summer. He told my daddy, “I had planned to be your son-in-law.”
Years later, when I was in graduate school, I called Mike to let him know that I had gone back to school, amounted to something after all. I couldn’t bear not to correct the last impression he had of me. He told me what he had done with his degree. Rather than being drafted like most guys his age, he went to Vietnam as a civilian and used his math skills to calculate bomb trajectories. He married a girl named Lynda, a coincidence, I’m sure. He had lost his hair and wasn’t cute anymore, he laughingly reported.
In my memory Mike will always be cute. He died in 2015 at the age of 71. His obituary states that he retired in 2011 from L3, an aerospace company. “He was dedicated to a long life of learning as he continued to study Physics, Aquaponic Farming, Biology, Chemistry and Genetics,” it reads. I wonder how my life would have turned out if Mike hadn’t sent me back to Oklahoma? Would he have become my Daddy’s son-in-law? I probably would’ve messed it up.
Greg gave up trying to make a living in Lubbock and headed west to find work. His grandmother’s brother Andy Isbell worked for the international construction company that had the contract to build the new highway over Raton Pass, the CanAm Highway, US25. Greg had been out to New Mexico with his grandfather to work for Andy the previous summer. Now he was put to work driving a machine called a Hyster, dirty and dangerous work. One day Greg bounced off the seat and was thrown onto the moving tread. Rather than being crushed to death under the machine, he was thrown clear and suffered only bruising and soreness.
I went to Antlers to wait for him to make enough money to send for me. That first week back in Mother’s house, sleeping again in my old bedroom with the splintered door, I couldn’t stop throwing up. Worse, I came down with the flu and was in bed for a week. For a change Mother was motherly, bringing me liquids or anything else I could keep down. She was between husbands. Every morning, before I even opened my eyes, I could feel it coming and would lurch out of bed and rush to the bathroom to retch.
Greg wrote passionate letters from New Mexico, as if he only really fell in love with me after we parted. Or maybe he was just homesick. He had found a bed in the home of another Antlers guy working for Andy Isbell, James Horton. I had been a classmate of James’s sister Francine. I recovered from the flu and from morning sickness. But I kept getting cramps. Dr. Akins prescribed a new drug called Diethylstilbestrol (DES) and said that I should take the train when I went to New Mexico. I had once looked for bumpy roads to get rid of a pregnancy; now I avoided them to save one. Years later when I was a young teacher in Houston, I would get a letter from the FDA advising all women who had taken DES during pregnancy to have their daughters screened for uterine cancer.
In Raton, James Horton was living with a fiery Mexican woman who fed us, then kicked us out. As we left, I could hear her screaming at James in Spanish, calling me a puta. I think she was expecting me to be fat and, hopefully, unattractive.
Lugging all our worldly possessions, Greg and I walked down a long steep hill to N. 3rd Street where we had seen some small stucco cottages arranged around a central courtyard, eight units with arched openings in the Southwest style. One of the two larger apartments across the back was available. There was no bedroom, just a murphy bed that let down out of a closet in a corner of the living room, a bath, a tiny kitchen. It would be our home for the next six months, the place we brought our new daughter.
Every morning before dawn, Greg left to ride to the job site with other men on the crew, one of whom was our neighbor Paolo Maragua. I befriended his wife Rose who wore curlers and tended a toddler named Christine. Every day Rose made a batch of flour tortillas and boiled beans and dried chilis for Paolo’s supper. Just before he was due to arrive home, she brushed out her dyed red hair, put on lipstick and a sexy dress to greet her man.
On the opposite side of the courtyard was a blonde named Elaine Chicarilli, married to an Italian we called Chic. Elaine was a few months further along in her pregnancy and confided that she wouldn’t let Chic have sex anymore as it might make the baby “dirty.” As young wives of varying backgrounds and experience, we discussed such things freely.
The men arrived home from work covered in grime. Greg would need to soak in hot water for half an hour to melt off the dirt. On Friday evenings he brought home a paycheck and we walked down the street to the Safeway to cash it and buy groceries. We didn’t have a car, but our apartment was close to everything we needed. Twenty dollars would purchase a week’s worth of groceries, including lunchmeat and bread for Greg’s lunchbox.
I registered at a clinic and saw Dr. Smoker once a month for prenatal care. His fee, which included delivery, was $125. A week in the hospital cost an additional hundred bucks. Cheap as that seems now, it was nine times what my birth had cost my father. Today those same services run to $9,000, forty times more.
Raton is home to thoroughbred racing and pari-mutuel betting at Raton Downs. One of our neighbors came from Oklahoma for the racing season and we took Daddy and Mary Limbo to the track. It was very common to see two-dollar bills around town.
As summer progressed and I got bigger and more uncomfortable, I needed the whole bed to sprawl across, but Greg needed his sleep. Our route to Safeway and to the clinic took me past the Carnegie Library, and I stopped in every few days for a fresh supply of fiction. While Greg slept, I would sit up reading, and when he vacated the bed at five in the morning, I would take over and sleep till noon. We bought a tiny portable evaporative cooler that you poured water into. When the water ran out, it got so hot in the room I would have to get up.
Greg never met a stranger and was especially welcoming to door-to-door salesmen. One day he bought an enormous padded album that came with a subscription for enlargements. “Our Family” it said in gold script across the front. After our divorce, he ripped out the pages of me and mailed them to me, which is the only reason I have two photos of my 17-year-old pregnant self, in one wearing a red flowered tent that Rose Maragua gave me, in the other a beige two-piece number I bought. I had gained twenty pounds and thought I was disgustingly fat.
One night I was up late reading as usual when the old woman next door noticed my light on and knocked. I didn’t want her to wake up Greg, so I let her in. She was the sweet sloppy kind of drunk, lonely, wanting some company. She sat on the couch with her back to the murphy bed and I tried to hold her attention so she wouldn’t notice that Greg was lying on top of the covers buck naked. For a while my efforts worked and she didn’t notice, but finally she looked over her shoulder and was struck dumb. “Oh, well,” she said, turning back to me, “I could diaper him.” I told my girlfriends, who told their husbands, and Greg got teased at work.
Mary Limbo, on the basis of having had a baby herself, was my expert on all things maternal. I could never have enough diapers, she advised. Every week another dozen arrived in the mail, along with little shoes and outfits. Greg and I bought a white wicker crib on a stand and a tri-colored cat came to live with us and slept in it. As my delivery date loomed, my sister also came to stay. She was fourteen and Greg’s friend Alton Little thought she was pretty cute. So, apparently, did our landlord. One night, Betty came running out of the bathroom wearing a towel saying there was a bear at the window. Greg jumped up and ran out to defend her honor and caught the old fart standing on the coal cellar door trying to get a glimpse of my naked teenaged sister.
We only had the one murphy bed, so Betty slept on a couch that converted to an uncomfortable bed. Toward the end of my term I was so restless and uncomfortable I made Greg sleep there, too, his overly-long frame dangling off the end. My hair got dry and the ends split. I got cavities in my teeth and deep red scars on my butt. Mary Limbo advised that I rub a certain ointment into my skin, but it only made me greasy. I was miserably uncomfortable and dreaded what was to come. Mine was not a Madonna-like pregnancy.
The guys gossiped as much as we did. Paolo bragged to Greg and Chic that he had a girlfriend on the side. Greg shared that tidbit with me and Betty, and Betty told Rose, Paolo’s wife, never dreaming she was lighting a rocket fuse. Rose brought Christine over and thrust her into Betty’s arms, clearing the deck for what was to come. The couple often staged noisy shouting matches that spilled into the courtyard. This one was spectacular. Neighbors stepped to their doors to watch. Those passionate Mexicans!
Greg knew that Paolo would figure out where the story came from, so he and my sister quickly worked out their strategy, deny everything. As it turned out, Paolo had bragged about his little bit on the side to so many people he never could pinpoint the source of the leak.
Late one night the second week of August I began to cramp. I started watching the clock. Don’t come until they’re five minutes apart, we had been instructed. They weren’t bad cramps, just regular, five to eight minutes apart. Maybe it was time. I woke up Betty and Greg. Mary Limbo had lent us her car, a cute little red Corvair so we would have a way to get to the hospital.
We arrived at Miner’s Hospital a few miles south of Raton, three teenagers without a clue what to expect. A nurse checked me over and sent us home. Not ready yet, she said, like thumping a watermelon and leaving it on the vine a while longer. A few nights later the same thing happened, again the cramps, five minutes apart, again the drive out to the hospital. This time they checked me in, but the cramps stopped and they gave me a sleeping pill and told me to get some rest. Betty and Greg went home.
The next morning a crew came in to “prep” me, enema, pubic shave, the whole humiliating routine. Everybody and their sister came in and looked at my crotch or stuck a finger up my ass. They gave me a shot and the cramps started again. Dr. Smoker came by for a breezy hello. The cramps stopped and they gave me another shot. This went on all day.
Finally, that afternoon something different happened, a water balloon bursting inside me. Water poured from between my legs. The nurses moved me to a gurney and rolled me down to the labor room. It’s 330 miles to Raton from Lubbock, but Daddy, a professional driver, arrived that afternoon. I said, “Daddy, get me out of here.” He put his head down on the bed beside me and cried because he couldn’t save me from what was about to happen.
I tried to hold my body so it wouldn’t hurt. Nobody told me to breath. Greg, Betty, Daddy hovered over me. Nurses came and shooed them out, checked my progress. Dr. Smoker came in and probed, not like the nurses through the ass, but through the vagina. There was talk of centimeters and crowning. The pain was horrendous. Now, instead of trying to avoid the pain, I met it fiercely, willing it to tear me in two. I had no choice but push. I couldn’t help myself. I learned how to work with the contractions and rest between them.
The gurney came back and hands transferred me over to the new bed. I didn’t know where my family was. I was beyond caring. We went through some metal doors and I was transferred again. I was vaguely aware that I was being strapped down, a mesh cone being placed over my nose and mouth. My lungs filled with sickly-sweet ether and I was out almost at once. I dreamily told Dr. Smoker that I wanted a girl because my husband wanted a girl. A little after 8 pm, August 12, 1964, our 5 lb. 6 oz. daughter was born. I wasn’t there. I wouldn’t come around for hours.
It was dark when I woke up. A nurse was changing my sanitary pad and I thought, how odd, how intimate. No one’s ever done that before. I looked down and saw my belly, no longer inflated, but weirdly collapsed with a lump in it. I slept again and it was still dark when I woke up. Greg was leaning over me and I realized he was drunk, which made me mad, but a nurse was holding out a little bundle and I focused on that instead, my first look at what had been inside me for so long. There was a little clear scab on her upper lip and a sprinkle of white dots on her nose. Her eyes were the darkest blue I’d ever seen and she looked right at me and seemed to know who I was. They were all crowding over the bed, Daddy, Greg, Betty. I was so tired. I wanted everybody to go away and just let me sleep.
The maternity ward was its own separate wing, a sunny corner of Miner’s Hospital, six or eight beds. My bed was farthest from the door. I could see all the other mothers, watch them coo over their babies and show them off to visitors. Every day one of the Mexican mothers was released, but I stayed. I couldn’t leave until I shit. Those were the rules. Dr. Smoker had cut me from stem to stern to get the baby out. The very thought of shitting sent shivers of horror up my spine. Straining against that pain was too awful to think about. And so I stayed, seven days I stayed.
Greg and Betty came daily to see me. I was giving Greg the cold shoulder for getting drunk while I was trying to squeeze a baby out. I suspected that he and my sister were getting better acquainted while I was in the hospital. Mother, too, celebrated the birth by getting drunk. The day after my ordeal, I was called to the phone and had to walk all the way down to the nurse’s station to listen to her bellyache that I hadn’t hung on to the kid one more day so they could share a birthday.
After a week, the nurses gave up trying to make me poop and sent us home with our little bundle of fury. It would have been useful those days I spent in the hospital learning something about the care and feeding of that child, but we were as ignorant upon our return as when we set out. Betty, with pointers from Greg, changed the first diaper. She held the baby up to show off her handiwork and the diaper fell off. Mary Limbo, the baby expert, had shown me how to fold the large rectangle of absorbent fabric into a kite shape and I tried it now. It was hard to drive the big dull safety pins through all the layers, taking care to keep your own finger on the backside to keep from sticking the baby, but we all got the hang of it. Washing shitty diapers was another thing entirely. They had to be rinsed out in the toilet first, then stored in a special covered pail until you took them to the laundromat and washed them in their own cycle with Dreft baby detergent, guaranteed not to break out the baby’s skin.
Almost as soon as I got home, I came down with a bladder infection, only we had no idea what was wrong. It was a different kind of pain than labor, sharp and unrelenting. Leaving the infant in Betty’s care, Greg drove me back to the hospital and my long-suffering doctor was called out of a movie theater to write a prescription. The nurse said it was a pity new mothers were released so early from the hospital. We were back home in record time, but meanwhile Betty had panicked and fed the baby from the carton of milk in the refrigerator. Now the infant was constipated and we agonized over every empty diaper.
Dr. Smoker had been to a conference on a new-fangled concept called breast-feeding and was on a mission to sell the idea to all his new mothers. I found the whole process excruciating and disgusting. My nipples dried out and cracked. I rubbed a special nursing cream on them that got all over the baby’s face. Dr. Smoker suggested that I try to relax, that maybe a beer just before feeding would help. A six-pack might’ve helped. I gritted my teeth and hated my child. She kept losing weight. After several weeks I gave her a bottle and she latched on to it like she was starving.
Greg and I had each picked a name. I thought “Lezlie” sounded cosmopolitan and intelligent. He picked “Anthelia,” a Steelman family name. We needn’t have bothered. My daughter would grow up to reject her name like everything else connected to the mother who had never wanted her.
We left New Mexico before the first of September, heading to Lubbock to return Mary Limbo’s Corvair. Ann had sent Greg $400 to buy a car. I was upset because the landlord who spied on my naked sister had cheated us out of our $50 deposit, despite how clean we left the place. Also, I had left a load of towels in the dryer at the laundromat, my beautiful new towels the Methodist ladies had given me. By the time I remembered, we had gone too far to go back. I was proud of what we had achieved, though. I had successfully given birth to a human, and Greg, just eighteen, had supported us and paid the doctor and hospital.
The highway coming off the Sangre de Cristo mountains winds through a series of otherworldly buttes and mesas. I realize today that our own horizons were limitless, that we could’ve gone anywhere. But we headed to Oklahoma because that was home. Our families hadn’t seen the new baby yet. We needed to figure out what to do about school, jobs, Greg’s draft status. He was married and had a child, but every year the government eliminated another deferment category and the possibility of being sent to Vietnam inched closer. He needed to enroll in college or risked being called up.
Somewhere west of Lubbock the Corvair broke down and Daddy had to come get us. A tow truck delivered the Corvair to a garage where a man in greasy overalls named Mike Limbaugh discussed the busted water pump with Mary. “Why is that man’s name the same as yours?” I asked as we drove away. “Oh, that’s Kina’s daddy,” she said. With Mary Limbo you never knew.
Daddy and Greg went off to conduct the other automotive business, see how much car they could get for the $400 Greg’s mother had sent. Neither of them being a horse trader, they came home with a finny 7-year-old black and white Ford Fairlane. When Ann Guzman heard about it, she hit the roof. “I thought I was buying a ’61 Corvair!” Ralph Nader’s book Unsafe at any Speed detailing the designed-in dangers of Corvairs wouldn’t be published for another year.
I’m not sure we were any safer in the Fairlane. Let’s skip ahead to its last breakdown, in the side yard of my mother’s house under an oak tree. From time to time Greg lifted the hood and tinkered with its innards, but master mechanic he was not. After some months, Thomas Hawks got tired of looking at the car, Mother reported, and poured a can of motor oil on it and set it on fire. My family was always trying to solve a problem by setting fire to it. Now, instead of a car that didn’t run sitting in the yard, we had the black skeletal remains of a car.
